


remove the cause (but not the symptom)

by broguebingo (adazzledim)



Category: Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Multi, Rocky Horror Picture Show References, Unresolved Romantic Tension, the subtext here is of course that everyone involved is bisexual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26695015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adazzledim/pseuds/broguebingo
Summary: “I'm sorry to make this weird,” he says to Gwen, not turning to face her, “but what the fuck is this? What are we doing?”
Relationships: Guinevere/Arthur Pendragon, Guinevere/Lancelot du Lac
Kudos: 2





	remove the cause (but not the symptom)

Lance starts to think this was a mistake almost the exact moment he and Gwen turn the corner onto Mallory Place, and he remembers it’s past midnight on a Friday and bloody packed. The further they get from the pub, the more ridiculous he feels; everyone who walks by is _looking_ at him and he’s uncomfortable, for the first time that evening since they walked into the theatre bar with Merlin, and Merlin's friend Vivian, in blue eyeshadow, fishnets and a criminally tiny black dress, rose to greet them. 

(“Viv and I went to uni together when we were your age, way back in the Middle Ages,” Merlin explained once they'd all settled in with their pints, and Vivian rolled her eyes over her gin and tonic, but not without amusement. “We're an old couple,” she told Gwen and Lance later, conspiratorially, “neither of us can say anything that shocks the other any more. This certainly isn't our first Rocky Horror, let's put it that way.” Gwen snorted a laugh, eyes bright, and Lance couldn't help but wonder if that would be them, one day, in twenty or thirty years' time; if they would ever be able to sit in a bar together and talk with that kind of sure, easy fondness about the way they met.) 

Lance, who had spent the half hour before he left his flat worrying if Morgana's borrowed red lipstick was going to be too much paired with his three-day-old stubble, had finally had the feeling he'd gotten it right, for once. Now, hours later and several blocks from the theatre, there isn't another costume in sight, and it feels like a jester's motley: the mesh shirt, the tight pants, the rough eyeliner and by now gratuitously smeared lipstick. Gwen hadn't meant to dress up at all but accidentally showed up in a near-perfect Brad costume, because she wears weird preppy stuff like that all the time anyway, so now she just looks like any other sharply-dressed punter. Lance looks like a hooker, and honestly, that's an insult to hookers.

They make it halfway from the pub to Lance’s bus stop before he can't stand it any longer. If he’s going to feel like a zoo animal being gawked at by every other passer-by, he may as well be equally humiliated by the stupid conversation he left the pub to have in the first place. “I'm sorry to make this weird,” he says to Gwen, not turning to face her, “but what the fuck is this? What are we doing?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Gwen give him a blank, confused look. “What the fuck is… what?”

“This. Us.” He can hardly get the words out, now that the initial flush of courage is past. “Whatever we are.”

“There's an us?”

“I mean. I… you know that I still… right? You have to know.”

And she has the gall to look surprised, to look like this is news to her. “Oh.”

“... yeah.”

“No, I didn't know that, uh. That. I thought you'd gotten over last year.”

They pass the shitty club on the corner, ducking past the line of swaying, giggling first-years snaking over the pavement. Lance should have turned up Whig St by now, but he keeps walking, arguing to himself that there’s another stop further up Plymouth and the walk is nicer anyway. He’s sobered up enough now that the music seems unbearably loud. He grimaces, feeling wretched. “Well, I'm trying to do that, and it's not fucking working, is the thing.”

“Oh,” Gwen says again.

“So just – I can sit here in silence forever and be happy with nothing, but don't – don't give me hope where there isn't any.”

A long pause. “Well. You know that Arthur is – you know that I am in a relationship right now –”

“Yes, I do know that.”

“And you know that I'm very happy, and I would never – I couldn't – I wouldn't want to…” Another, longer pause. Eventually Lance gets the impression that she's not, in fact, going to finish that sentence.

“I'm not asking you to,” he supplies, trying to sound detached.

“Right. But I – the thing is, I never – I didn't really stop, after last year. You know. Liking you.”

Which makes part of Lance want to get up and start dancing a conga line through the pearly gates, and another part want to put its head through some drywall. “Okay,” he says instead, with what he thinks is remarkable calm. “Right. That's good to know.” … That part comes out maybe a bit sharper than he meant.

“But I don't – I didn't – I had no idea, Lance, you have to believe me.” And that stings worse than any other part of this conversation, because never once in the impossibly long year and two months since he first asked Gwen out only to find that Arthur _fucking_ Pendragon had beaten him to it by a week – never once in the ensuing course of their awkward but earnest friendship has he considered that Gwen didn't know what she was doing to him, that there wasn't at least a little intention on her part, malicious or otherwise. 

Lance _does_ believe her. More fool him, he supposes.

“Well,” he says hoarsely, “you know I'm not going anywhere. Just don't make me wait forever, if anything does change.”

Gwen's at a loss for words on that one, apparently, because they walk past the last few shops to the corner of Plymouth and Mallory in silence. When his crossing goes green and he turns to leave, telling her to get home safe, she just says “I will,” and “you too, Lance.”

He doesn't want to know if she's watching him walk away. He doesn't. It's still an effort of will not to look back.

**Author's Note:**

> title from sweet transvestite. any resemblance to real persons and/or events is fully intended and deeply therapeutic
> 
> ETA: SHE BROKE UP WITH "ARTHUR" AND WE WENT ON A DATE. HIT THE SHOWERS TEAM


End file.
